Two sound cards?

[Dermbrian]

Is it possible to have a PC using one sound card for one application (jukebox) and another sound card for everything else?

I want my son to be able to use our living room PC for general computing (Guild Wars, Facebook, LOL cats.....maybe homework) and hear those program's sounds without those sounds overlaying music playing through the jukebox app.  Jukebox would be WinCab (now dwjukebox...), Freebox, and/or SKJukebox.  I'd only have to interrupt him when I want to queue up another batch of songs.

If I can do this, then I won't really need to go the whole HTPC route.  I can always just plug our laptop into the TV when I want to watch an online show or iTunes movie.  And I can maybe then keep my spending down to a sound card and a touchscreen.  That would be nice.

A quick search online shows a lot of interest in this in Linux applications, but I am talking XP, maybe Vista, and certainly Windows 7 eventually.



Brian

[Dermbrian]

It sounds like this has been done using WinCab, so now I'm on the lookout for a suitable sound card. 

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=57670.0


Baby step 1.



Brian

[heffe2001]

Any sound card would probably work fine, possibly a USB sound dongle would be an easy solution to try as well (and not require any slots on the PC).   I would also suggest Vista for the OS, as it's super-easy working with multiple sound-cards with the mixer supplied with Vista (I use a virtual sound card to play Pandora on my Sage server, routing all it's sound to the virtual plug while keeping the other sounds localized to my onboard card, works very well on my system).

One issue I could possibly see is running full-screen games.  On my dual-monitor setup on my main PC, some games and full-screen exclusive programs tend to make the secondary monitor do strange things, especially when they change resolution.  Most games I play I put into windowed mode to get around that (not sure if Guildwars will let you do that or not, need to break out my old acct and test it out sometime).  If the game supports Windowed borderless mode, you'll be in good shape there (unless Wincab in full-screen mode has issues).

The other issue may be the touch-screen pulling the mouse off his screen, and the fact that if he moves the mouse pointer off the side of the screen that the touchscreen is set to, it'll go off his screen completely.  Also you using the touch-screen when he's doing something will switch the application focus to the juke app from what he's doing, would definitely cause issues with gaming...

Another option I mentioned on another thread was to go with something like an Intel Atom board, it's very small, and has plenty of horsepower for a jukebox (probably really overkill, but it will future-proof it at least for a while).  It's a small board, drop that, 2gb ram, and a 30g SSD drive on it, and a touch-screen and you'd have about what you'd spend for a really good video card (which you'd probably need for gaming with dual-screens anyway), and not have the issues with window focus, or dual-monitors.

[Dermbrian]

Another option I mentioned on another thread was to go with something like an Intel Atom board, it's very small, and has plenty of horsepower for a jukebox (probably really overkill, but it will future-proof it at least for a while).  It's a small board, drop that, 2gb ram, and a 30g SSD drive on it, and a touch-screen and you'd have about what you'd spend for a really good video card (which you'd probably need for gaming with dual-screens anyway), and not have the issues with window focus, or dual-monitors.

I would like to build something like you describe.  I keep considering that.  Do you use the SSD for the operating system, principally, and then use another drive (USB for example) hard drive for the media?  My drawback with doing that, though, is adding the cost of an operating system. 

Regarding just adding a second sound card and a touchscreen to our existing Compaq Presario desktop in the living room, I would be replacing the existing monitor with the USB touchscreen.  I wouldn't use two monitors or a graphics card.  I push him aside frequently now and he dies in his game.  The main difference I'm looking at is being able to play my FLACs and mp3's without hearing him being torn to shreds by raptors, and having those sounds be only in his headset or desktop speakers.

I also have my soundcast transmitter/receiver pair from woot that will let me listen to the audio in another room.  Again, I don't do that currently because the computer is usually in use with other sounds coming into play through the line-out.


Brian
 

[heffe2001]

If you're only going to be using one monitor, and it's primarily going to be used by him, I'd not even bother with the touch-screen.  As for the SSD in my machine, I'm using it for my OS and data drive.  The jukebox I'm running only has provisions for 50 CD's (I can squeeze maybe 58 or so if I do some creative work on the playcard flipbook holders), so it all fits on the 30g SSD easily (about 500m-600m for the OS/support programs, and about 4.5gb for the mp3's).  The Atom board system on the SSD I have boots in approximately 12 seconds (give or take, I haven't taken the old stopwatch to it, but it definitely boots faster than any of my other PC's).  The only drawback on SSD's are they have a limited write-life, so turning off the swapfile will extend the life of the drive considerably (although the write-life is managed by the drives firmware to mitigate that somewhat, I'd rather not take changes if at all possible).  At one point I even had the system booting off of a 4g CF card, but couldn't fit all the mp3's I wanted on the box along with the OS on it, although I did have it working with a network share for music.  I got the SSD during the Black Friday sale at Newegg for about 69$ (normal price was I think 89 at the time), so it was actually cheaper than I paid for the CF card & sata adapter for it (that was about 90 for the combo).  You could also use a 2.5" laptop drive (or regular HD), just take that into account when placing speakers near the unit (if it's an in the wall type system you'll likely not have speakers anywhere near it, so a regular HD would be a cheaper option, or better still a small HD for the OS, and a usb external HD for music so you can easily plug it into your PC to change stuff or add music, etc).

[Blanka]

On a Mac there is Airfoil, which you can use to redirect any sound output/input to/from any application to/from any sound device, USB, BT, FireWire or built in. Maybe you can google for Airfoil alternative windows?

[dhcf23]

You may be able to do this with only one compatible sound card and the KX Drivers  http://kxproject.lugosoft.com/

I have not used them but there are some users in the Xlobby forum using those drivers and one sound card to drive multiple zones. You may be able to basically the same thing as that.

also if you don't want to bug your son to change tracks or reload your playlist Xlobby can be signed into from another computer as a client, or you can contorl other zones so you could use your laptop and never bother your son. There may be other frontends that can do the samething but i am new here and only really familiar with Xlobby from my HTPC stuff.

Here is an example of someone using those kx drivers in xlobby, probably way more info than you want on it but an example none the less.
 
http://mayhem.prod.googlepages.com/musiczoningsystem